Bringing Wine-Making Business Online: What Matters Most To Customers

As of the Internet outburst, turning a traditional business into an e-business model has been a thorny problem for entrepreneurs and managers. One crucial decision is how the online service should be designed. The goal of this research is to measure the value for customers of different combinations of service attributes in an online wine-making business model and to identify segments of customers based on these preferences. We conducted a survey on a sample of potential customers of an online start-up and applied a conjoint analysis to build the utility functions. We clustered customers and run linear regression models in order to build segment-level utility functions. We identified nine segments of customers with similar preferences and inferred some managerial implications.